Your Happiness: "I Want to Go There!"

My Happy Place is…

Under a Big Whale

By Jessi Klein, writer and comedian

Some people, when they are anxious, turn to chocolate (which can be fun). Others choose exercise (meh). When I'm really freaking out about life, nothing makes me feel as happy and calm as going to the Museum of Natural History in New York City, where I head straight to the Hall of Ocean Life to lie flat on the floor (the security guards are surprisingly OK with this) and stare up at the full-size replica of a giant blue whale.

Some history: When I was a kid, we would occasionally take school trips to see this same whale. At that age, her size was frightening to me. While the other kids would lie underneath her, I'd hide behind the crab display.

Decades later, after a stint living on the West Coast, I returned to New York, believing that my long-distance boyfriend was ready to commit. I overlooked one small detail: He wasn't. So my bestie GF, bless her heart, dragged me out of bed for a reunion visit with our old whale friend. It had been years since I'd seen the giant beast, and unlike most things from childhood, which become less impressive with the passage of time, she looked better than ever. We sprawled out on the floor and looked up. Something about her awesome scope gave me the thing I'd been missing those last few weeks: perspective. I was reminded that the world abounds with magic and mystery—stuff that is all too easy to ignore when you're saving grumpy emails to your ex in a drafts folder.

I go lie under the whale every few months. No matter what's going on in my life, it always makes me feel relaxed and reinvigorated. And when you're getting over a breakup, there's really no better way to remember that there are always other fish in the sea.

My Happy Place is…

Onstage

By Kat Ahn, stand-up comic

The dank smell of cheap sour mix and old beer permeates my nostrils before I step onto the stage of a Hollywood-area comedy club on Sunset Boulevard. Those moments are accompanied by pain and awkwardness. Often, I'm one of the few females in a room full of male comics. Sometimes I feel completely naked and vulnerable. Then a slightly jaded host calls out to the crowd that this next girl is from Philly, she's shy, she's Asian, she's…Kat Ahn! A few awkward glances land in my direction, but hardly anyone looks up from their vodka sodas. No matter. I grab the mike, and whatever the audience perception of me was before I started talking, now they see a Korean-American gal telling jokes, rapping and making them belly laugh. This is happiness: For seven minutes, I'm the thing I want to be—a badass, hilarious, creative chick. The girl who owns who she is and is proud.

My Happy Place is…

the Beach

Sometimes I come here for the sunset, the pink and lavender sky. Sometimes I come at night, when the horizon becomes pearly below the glow of the moon. I come for inspiration, for solace and for answers to internal questions, be they of plots for one of my books, professional dilemmas or relationship struggles. Sometimes I come when I'm just overwhelmed and need to ground my bare feet in the wet sand. Sometimes I come here to remember the past. Sometimes I come to forget. Sometimes I come to dream of the future and draw out plans and possibilities. Mostly I come here out of gratitude. No matter the chaos of my life, the beach remains tranquil and welcoming, a constant companion.

My Happy Place is…

My Front Porch

When I lived in New York City, one thing I missed most was having a front porch. To compensate, on visits home to my native Texas, I devoted plenty of time to porch sitting. I wrote most of my first book while on an extended trip there. In my New York apartment, trying to be creative amid doubt, my missed deadlines and unpaid bills felt like rocks crashing against one another. At my mom's house, when the scenes and stories in my head refused to yield to the page, I could set aside my work and escape to the front porch for another point of view. Out there, my eyes received the rays of winter sun instead of the computer's glow. On that threshold between public and private space, I merely practiced staring—at the tiny dramas unfolding among inhabitants of the soil, at the activity in the tree branches. I moved only to follow the sun. Not much could be accomplished, and that's exactly how I wanted it.

My Happy Place is…

a Hammock

My happy place is… my boss's hammock. Allow me to clarify. Ten years ago, when I left a job at one book-publishing company for a job at another, I had my hesitations. I had grown quite fond of Company #1 and thought, Well, what are the chances I will like my coworkers this much at Company #2? Turns out, not only did I like them, but they became family. Specifically my gay male boss, with whom I developed a close friendship founded on bad jokes, a passion for great books and late-night takeout at the office. We'd go for weekend outings at his beautiful country house, with a porch perfect for late-night glasses of wine and enough pet-hair-covered sofa cushions to keep Claritin in business. Located on a hill just above the garden is a hammock. I have taken about 5.6 guilt-free naps in that hammock, swaying under the trees, using a beach towel as a pillow and listening to my work family argue about the latest best-seller down by the pool. I can't think of a better sound than a heated and likely ridiculous debate about books—being delivered via the breeze as I fall asleep.

My Happy Place is…

Youtube

Whenever I want to feel instantly happy, like I'm on some kind of cheap and consequence-free drug, I search YouTube for "National Anthem bloopers." I realize that might sound pathetic and nerdy (or stupid and infantile?), but it never gets old, and I love it. I do. Everything else—the stresses of the day, failures, anxieties, whatever, all of it—just melts away as people butcher those immortal words. "Whose bright stripes and bright stars and the ev-ovly light, and the ramparts we watched were so ellen-ly fleeing." And it's bottomless, too, this well of National Anthem bloopers. Oh man, there's one with a cop—even just thinking about it makes me smile—"By the dawn's early light, what so help-ly twilight, at the last glea-ming [something]. O'er the rapids we watched…and the stars were still there." And I think it's at a funeral, this cop video, which I swear makes it funnier. Because life's a dramedy, right? I hope someone does something a tenth as funny at my funeral.